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Hi! I've recently made the decision to commit to a career in physical oil trading, and I had a few questions regarding what direction I should take to maximise my chances.
I am currently in a gap year at Imperial College London, studying Chemical Engineering. I have completed my 2nd year (of a 4 year degree), so I will be applying to summer internships in August-November of this year. My grade isn't optimal, a 2:2, however I am confident I can achieve a 1:1 by the end of the degree as I am now on ADHD Medication for the first time.
My current CV has 2 committe positions, in a finance society, and in the quant society, and I have a couple of coding projects.
The main one being a fully fleshed out trading platform for the quant society to use for its student fund, with data pipelines, strategy execution, and connection to a broker API, with a front end dashboard.
The 2nd project is a SSVI curve fitter for implied volatilities analysis, which is decent enough to put on my cv.
My questions are more directed towards what else I should do, I had originally planned to make a commodity dashboard, which would involved Forward Curves (with Nelson-Siegel, and I have already finished this), term structure analysis, different graphs to show differentials for different oil grades, perhaps inventory levels, maybe some models to relate AIS tanker data to storage/inventory levels, and a refinery LP for crack spread.
The other project I wanted to do was a trading bot that would trade based on crack spread, this is not fleshed out at all so I am not sure whether it'd even be within my skillset or viable to do.
However, I am no longer sure whether this would help much with breaking into the industry? From what I know I would want to get into BP/Shell TDP, or an entry level position at one of the commodity houses and then after a few years I might get lucky enough to pivot into a small book, and it doesn't sound like a heavy coding project would really help with this.
Along with the coding projects, I am reading a lot around the subject, news, books such as The World for Sale, etc. So I am trying to develop a good intuition and understanding of the market, how different things affect price logistics etc. I have tried cold emailing very small firms asking if they have anything, and connecting with people on LinkedIn, but this has been completely fruitless so far.
So I guess my main questions are:
* What should I even be doing?
How can I demonstrate competency and understanding of the markets and signal that I am a worthwhile candidate to interview
* What do successful applicants even have on their CVs (apart from experience)?
Experience is a no-go since it has been so unsuccessful